Review: Cozoy Takt Pro – Size Doesn’t Matter

Disclaimer: Cozoy provided the Cozoy Takt Pro free of charge for this review. The unit does not have to be returned. Cozoy is not a site advertiser. Many thanks for the generosity!

About Cozoy:Cozoy is a Hong Kong based manufacturer of portable digital to analogue converters and in ear monitors. The brand was established in 2014 and has rapidly gained fame for their great price to performance ratios.

The following is what can be found on their website under Brand Identity: Cozoy’s product design philosophy is to create fine metallic builds, with leading innovations on circuitry and implementations of cutting-edge metal processing techniques. Clean circuitry design with minimal features that affect sonic quality, strong shielding on cable, sockets and the chassis plus more concepts from hi-fi systems are implemented to perfect sound reproduction and durability of our offerings. In Cozoy we employ finest materials and designs, to ensure utmost fidelity and usability. Our team consists of specialists majored in industrial designs, acoustics design and various fields, together we hope to bring to the crowd audio excellence and long lasting designs.

Cozoy Takt Pro

About Takt Pro: Takt Pro is the reworked version of their already existing Takt. Both share the same physical design and concept but differ in internals and power. Takt Pro is the smallest audiophile device I know, my pinkie finger even is bigger in size. Takt Pro does not include a rechargeable battery or even a battery at all, it feasts power straight from the sourcing device, which of course will result in faster discharge of it. It supports sample rates up to 32bit and 384 Kilohertz plus DSD256. The entire unit is made out of an aluminium, magnesium and silicon alloy, which gives it a very durable build quality. In fact, the build quality is top notch. On top of the unit you will find the buttons for Play/Pause and the volume buttons. It only sports a single in and output, namely a micro USB input and a 3.5 Millimetre stereo jack. Cozoy implemented an ESS9028Q2C DAC chip, which is equipped with time domain jitter eliminators. The PCB is a four-layered gold plated one for shorter signal paths. Takt Pro is MFI certified and thus does not need an additional Camera Connection Kit when hooking up to an Apple device. When looking at their website again, we can learn that Takt Pro uses an ultra-low ripple power supply, asynchronous clock design and six arrays of discreet regulators. The rated output power is 1.5V RMS at 32 Ohms, which of course is not the highest around, but for a device that small and without its own battery that is only normal. Takt Pro sells for 289$ and can be purchased through one of their official dealers or directly from Cozoy on their website.

Cozoy Takt Pro

Package and Content: Since my unit is a non-commercial review unit it did not come with a retail packaging. Cozoy though did supply the included digital interconnects. What you will get is the Takt Pro itself and three types of different short cables. A lightning to micro USB, a USB OTG (micro to micro) and a standard USB A to micro USB cable. The included accessories are very nice and make it clear that this DAC’s purpose is mainly for smart devices. I have personally used it with my Android phone on the move, my iPad Air2 at home and with my work PC at the office. The cables are of shorter nature and fulfil their purpose. Cozoy also sells USB C to micro USB interconnects. They have kindly included one with my review unit. Unfortunately I do not have many devices with an USB C connector, only the Astell&Kern SP1000… As mentioned before, the build quality of Takt Pro does not leave anything to be desired. It is CNC’d very nicely without any sharp corners or edges. The incredibly small form factor might be a shocker at first.

A daytime code monkey with a passion for audio and his kids, Linus tends to look at gear with a technical approach, trying to understand why certain things sound the way they do. When there is no music around, Linus goes the extra mile and annoys the hell out of his colleagues with low level beatboxing.

Roman

I did a little test using the tiny FiiO I1 DAC/amp with the Apple Lightning connector, and it drove 2 mid-priced headphones fairly loud, with little or no distortion. I would like to know what the limits of this device are for mid-tier headphones of low-to-mid impedance.